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The
Armand V. and Donald S. |
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Converging Technologies at Union Planning the Center
for Bioengineering and Computational Biology I. IntroductionI would like to thank Donald and Armand Feigenbaum for arranging this symposium and those who were responsible for inviting me to say a few words today. I have been asked to say a few words about plans to develop a Center for Bioengineering and Computational Biology at Union College. The Center is funded by a grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (or HHMI) and will serve as the focus of the various initiatives funded by the grant. The aim of this center and the programs it will support is to facilitate and organize interdisciplinary collaborations and interactions among biologists, engineers and computer scientists (and other disciplines) at Union in order to generate a variety of curricular innovations, student and faculty research opportunities, and outreach activities that will bring Union to the attention of students and scientists all over the local area, the country and the world. The idea for this center grew directly out of the converging technologies concept. It began with discussion in biology about how CT might influence our field and how we might use it to improve the teaching of Biology and related fields. These discussions caused us to focus on the importance of interactions between Biology and the college’s engineering and computer science departments. As a result, we applied for a grant from the Howard Hughes foundation. I am proud to say that last May we learned that the grant had been funded for 1.6 million dollars. II. Interdisciplinary sciencesAs you all know the sciences are divided into a few traditional major disciplines such as Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Psychology, Engineering etc. Each discipline is characterized by a particular philosophy, level of study and guiding set of questions. Moreover the students of each discipline share a minimum common body of knowledge and training, and this is a great strength of the system of dividing science into disciplines. The scientists within a discipline can communicate easily with each other and tend to understand the fundamental questions they are trying to answer. There are, however, tremendous opportunities for original research, innovation, new discovery and revolutionary progress for individuals who are willing and able to reach out from their own discipline and employ the methods and ideas from other disciplines to tackle problems. The hard part about doing interdisciplinary science is that, in theory a true interdisciplinary scientist has to master the basics underpinnings of two disciplines. These days we do well if we manage to learn the underpinnings of one small sub-discipline within our field, so can we really expect anyone to fully master two distinct scientific disciplines? There is, after all, just so much time in the day. One of the best solutions to this problem is for students of the different disciplines to team up for interdisciplinary collaboration. Whether for teaching, research, design of student projects, or running a business the most practical way to bring the ideas and techniques of more than discipline to bear on a problem, is to bring together the expertise of individuals from different disciplines. This is a highly valuable exercise, but it is not without its problems. In order to generate effective cross-disciplinary collaboration it is necessary to bridge the communication gap between the individuals trained in the respective disciplines. Probably most challenging of all, they must come to agree on the problems to be solved – for it is the nature of the problems themselves that defines and separate the disciplines in the first place. Additionally the members of the team must be able to explain to each other what they are trying to do. Finally there are often formidable technical problems. The tools and methods of one discipline may not be of the appropriate scale and design for the other, and new tools and methods may need to be generated. That, I believe is the true challenge before us here. We have a lot of scientists and philosophers and computer scientists and engineers and everything else at UNION. Can we get together and create coherent interdisciplinary projects, labs, courses and curricula? And – even more important since we are a college – can we teach our students how to collaborate across disciplines? This presents two challenges: can we show them that it is a useful thing to do, and can we show them how to do it? It is not simply a question of teaching them more than one field, they must explicitly learn the the skills required to work in cross-disciplinary teams. It is for these reasons that we have proposed to develop the Center for Bioengineering and Computational Biology. We want to offer incentives for collaboration and to provide the means to overcome the obstacles which tend to stand in the way of them. Throughout we want our students to be at the center of the process. III. Overview of the Center Now I want to briefly review what this center will consist of. As a physical place it will consist of:
The center will also be the conduit for the distribution of funds to support faculty development, student and faculty research, curriculum development, pre-college training and outreach. IV. How this center might work? To give you a sense of how we believe this Center will work, I’m going to tell a tale, a fable really. It starts with a true story, and then I will proceed on to an imaginary tale of how this story might continue once our bioengineering center is up and running. First, the true part of the story. Two years ago a student named Scott Robinson walked into my office. Scott had been a biology major early in his career but, sometime around the end of his sophomore year he switched to a major in mechanical engineering. In the summer preceding his senior year he got a summer research position studying stress formation during contraction of mammalian hearts at a medical research laboratory somewhere downstate. Scott was hoping to continue some aspect of this work in a senior engineering project. He had already spoken with Dr. Ron Bucinell of Mechanical Engineering, and Ron had informed him that he had a computer-based two-camera system that used speckle interferometry to measure localized deformation and strain. What Scott needed now was a heart. He came to me, and I suggested using an amphibian heart as a model, because I doubted a mammalian heart could survive the various stresses that would be involved in carrying out the project. So, a collaborative project was born. Scott would show up in my lab, where we would carry out a dissection, he would then walk his fully anesthetized, opened-up frog across campus to Ron’s lab where they would attempt to measure the localized stresses on the surface. There were a lot of problems along the way – the method was actually designed for measuring beams and boards and that kind of thing, and it required speckling the surface in black and white. Early on we discovered that the paint Ron typically used for this was highly toxic to the frog and months were spent trying to find a way to put a speckled coating on the heart that Ron’s cameras could detect. In the end, however, there was some degree of success. Scott brought the method along to the point where it he could record local stress changes on the heart surface over time as the heart beat, and he made some lovely computer-enhanced videos of the process. He gave talks at various meetings and even won a student prize. He never found a cure for heart failure, but he had learned a lot about the challenges of interdisciplinary science. He has gone on to a graduate program in bioengineering. Now I want to continue this story, but this part is imaginary. How might things continue in the future with the bioengineering center in place? Let us suppose that the two faculty members who supervised Scott decided that this was a great project and a really good learning experience. Moreover they decided that it was a shame to waste the progress Scott had made. (1) So they get together and put together a small research proposal to the Bioengineering Center. The HHMI grant provides, through the bioengineering center, small grants for research teams involving faculty from different disciplines. The grant gets approved and it provides them with funds for new equipment, fellowships for two undergraduates for the summer and funds to continue the work during the following year. (2) They post news of this grant on the website and soon several students come around who are interested in this research. They identify two students – one from biology and one from engineering to work on the project. The students decide they want to use this system to explore what happens when portions of the heart surface die – such as would happen during a small heart attack. How does the local distribution of stress and deformation shift and how is cardiac output impacted? The problem is a good one, but the students need to design some new apparatus. For example they need a system to monitor cardiac output, and ways to reliably reposition the cameras to identify local changes on the heart surface. With grant money in hand for supplies they head for the design facility and works with the technician to put together what they need and proceed with the project. (3) In the following academic year the two faculty members and two students pursue a set of projects showing effects of local tissue death on heart function. They write a paper that gets published and the students go off to pursue their respective careers at first rate graduate schools. (4) During the year another student becomes interested in this research. This student wants to study how changes in the shape of the heart as it contracts and expands influences its output. The original faculty members don’t know how to approach this problem. However, in the bioengineering center is a faculty member who knows how to do finite element analysis of complex surfaces. They seek out a computer science faculty member who can model these changes in 3-dimensional space. These faculty members put together a new proposal and with the student begin another project. (5) Another student approaches one of the faculty members who has read about these projects on the web site, but wants to study how electrical properties of the heart surface change with localized damage. There happens not to be anyone at Union with appropriate expertise, but it turns out there is someone at Syracuse University who does. The student applies for, and is awarded a fellowship from the center to spend the summer working at Syracuse. They also find a faculty mentor from Union who visits the lab in Syracuse. The Union faculty member, the Syracuse sponsor and the student develop a plan to continue the research at Union. The needed supplies are bought by the Bioengineering Center, and the necessary design work is carried out by the technician. (6) Meanwhile Profs. Fleishman and Bucinell think.... man, that was a cool project. The biologist thinks... I teach a frog heart lab in my Physiology course, but we don’t really quantify anything. This would be a great opportunity to show biology students how engineering principles can be applied to a biological problem. So the two of them apply for a lab module development grant (available from the Bioengineering center) and develop a new 3-week laboratory exercise looking at how damage and shape changes influence surface deformation properties and cardiac output in frog hearts. The exercise specifically points out the roles of biology and engineering in this project, thereby introducing the physiology students to the potential of engineering/biology collaborations. The laboratory exercise joins others posted on the web site with links to biology and science laboratory data bases. (7) A professor from Williams college sees the laboratory exercise on-line and thinks I’d like to use that, but I don’t really know how to develop and run the instruments. He notices that the Center will pay for visits from other college professors to come and use the facilities of the center to develop equipment and receive technical assistance in designing and carrying out the lab.....so he signs up and arranges a visit. (8) Finally an extremely bright high school student is looking for a place to go to college. He is interested in Biology and engineering – he types bioengineering into Google – and up pops the Union biology bioengineering center – where he reads about the amazing collaborative research projects and summer fellowships available and decides to check Union out. Well, that brings my fable to an end. Within a year this center will be up and running. It’s aim is simple: to end the obstacles and provide incentives for our faculty in biology and engineering and computer science to collaborate, and, at every level to involve our students in these collaborations. In this way we think we can make Union the first choice nationally of great students who want to study biology and engineering or biology and computer science.
Leo J. Fleishman |
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